Chương 3: Relinquish the Flesh!

Nihil stood with his hands raised, gun pressed to the back of his head, looking up at the limitless white space with its single imperfection. You have 59 minutes to rest! Please read the guidelines on how to use your experience points to unlock skills!

"You have your memories," he observed.

"A hidden condition in the skill? If you ever use the bullet on someone you don't love, your knowledge travels back too? A decent fail safe." He paused. Shook his head.

"I thought what we had was special…"

"Nothing that convoluted," Hope said.

"If the person who went back saves my life, I receive my own future memories. Shooter and victim are intrinsically linked, it's the fate of the world. I always meet my brother on level 11, where he saves my life. I guess this time it will be up to me to save him."

"You didn't ask me to run into the pyramid to seek you out," Nihil muttered, heart beating.

"You really gambled everything on the fact I'd try to recruit you because I knew your potential?"

"Asking you to do something would likely result in you doing the opposite, I merely mentioned recruiting my brother to plant the idea in your head. You came up with the rest on your own. I knew you were smart enough to suspect something if I was too direct.

"Alright, so what?" Nihil asked.

"What's with the gun? I started saving people, didn't I? First you and also the doctor. The amount of people that survived in comparison to last time on this stage. It's increased already."

"I told you that you had fallen prey to path dependency. Benefitting from powerful humans dying you naturally sought out their death. But your undead are static, ungrowing. Humanity has a higher ceiling than the power-levels that you doomed others to languish at by killing and reanimating them."

"The tower creates corpses at the same rate as it creates suffering, not making a skill that benefits from this abundant resource is insanity," Nihil argued coldly.

"I'm not asking," Hope replied grimly, pushing the steel barrel harder against his skull. Nihil mentally brought up the experience to skill conversion panel, ignoring his stats for now. You have: 8291 experience points Corpse Reanimation: A corpse meticulously preserved with all the tools currently available can be used as an animated servant. The physical prowess and abilities retained are proportionate to the level of preservation.

Rule 1: A corpse's degradation is final, the preservation done at the beginning cannot be retouched Rule 2: The user must go to every possible length to preserve the corpse as much as possible, or the skill doesn't activate Cost: 3910 Exp He'd already noticed earlier, but the experience points did not travel back with him. The discount however…

"The knowledge discount, it's fully applied. Familiarity breeds ease of access," Nihil hissed through gritted teeth.

"I could create the same skills years in advance, become even more powerful, save more people!"

"I don't care," Hope said coldly.

"If you don't promise me that you won't create a skill that benefits in any way from the deaths of others, I'm eliminating you right now. Without you many people who died… won't. Perhaps that itself is the solution to level 99, right here on level 0. 5. You're not the answer, you're the obstacle. A backup option maybe, IF you comply."

"Do you have any idea how much potential I'll lose if I pick another skillset?" Nihil said quietly, already calculating.

"Stop your bitching and promise," Hope replied, pushing the gun harder against his skull.

"Fine, fine I promise, sheesh," Nihil eventually gave in, starting to lower his hands, knowing that she would have actually blasted his brains out.

"Hands up!" Hope shouted, causing him to raise them right back up.

"You promised, good. Now do it."

"Now?" Nihil asked.

"A good skillset needs deliberation, time, care!"

"The favourite pastime of everyone in the tower was thinking of alternative skills that they could have taken instead had they known better. You have ten minutes, or you can say your final words." Nihil sighed and slumped together, starting to get a migraine. Experience in the tower could be exchanged for either stat points or personally crafted skills which benefited from user familiarity. He'd been a mortician back on Earth which had allowed him to create the skill Corpse Reanimation.

Now he'd spent years actually using those very same skills, so they would be even cheaper than they had been… Of course he'd concocted different builds, but this was an issue of sunk-cost fallacy. He already invested so much into the necromancer skills he'd personally and lovingly crafted.

"Nine minutes," Hope announced.

"Wait," Nihil interrupted.

"You made me promise to not create a skill that benefits from the death of others but continued holding me at gun-point, why?" He could hear the smirk in Hope's voice as she answered.

"I knew you'd first check out the different discounts you received because of your new knowledge before thinking if you could phrase things a bit better this time around. After all, many of us created skills we didn't fully understand back then, only to later find out you could only add to the description, not change anything you'd already included."

"So?" Nihil asked.

"Well, I knew I had a time window when we entered level 0. 5, but the thing was I already knew what skill to make to fulfil my objective, which is to neutralise you. After all, preventing you from taking the same skills as last time will already save many lives. My choice was easy. Bullet of Promise. If the target that makes the promise under threat from the gun breaks it, the bullet can be shot for a sure kill.

In other words, the moment you promised not to take a skill that benefits from dead humans, you lost your chance to ever do it." Nihil snorted.

"A sword like that can't be hung over someone's head forever," he argued.

"There must be other conditions, a time-limit."

"There's no reason for me to tell you," Hope said, chuckling.

"Eight minutes." Nihil sighed.

"Well, as much as I had you by the balls earlier it seems the situation is reversed now," he muttered, mind racing. Of course he'd conceived of other directions his skills could have taken, but he'd quite enjoyed standing in the back and letting his army of undead solve his problems while he fought off the occasional assassin that managed to sneak through. He frowned. He was sure Hope's skill, if it even existed, had a time-limit.

That meant that he could temporarily create a separate skillset and then add his bread and butter back in when he managed to eliminate Hope. After he found out the specifics of her new skill. She couldn't really stop him from following the path of necromancy considering that with the discount, even if he focused on something else until level 20, he could still pick up his old trade after and have an additional mechanic on top of it by then.

"You need me," he quietly argued one last time.

"Your brother didn't come back this time," he whispered harshly.

"I'm the only combatant that can swing the difference with him gone."

"Killing you saves lives, as I already said," Hope repeated.

"Seven minutes."

"Fuck," Nihil muttered, before resigning himself to his fate, to a certain extent. After all, there were ways of creating a skillset that benefitted from the death of others while not seeming to at first. Alternatively there were skillsets that could help him survive Hope's bullet, which he was sure was not a sure-fire kill. She couldn't have enough experience to ensure something ridiculous like that based on a forced verbal promise. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

It was probably more like a… guaranteed headshot. He'd always lacked a bit of durability with his necromancer build but had never found the points to explore that area without the use of corpses. At some point it really was too expensive to branch out anymore. Maybe this was his opportunity?

"Six minutes." There was one skillset that was highly beneficial to have in a tower where the competition often came just as much from the levels as it did from other humans. Inhuman biology. Fighting an enemy that controlled brain chemistry? Inhuman biology. Poisonous gas? Inhuman biology. A gun that could always headshot if certain conditions were met? Inhuman biology. Nihil was very familiar with working on bodies, with sewing, with threads, turning corpses into something more.

He queried the skill he was thinking of, one that he'd crafted for himself in the event he ever had enough points to diversify. 8001 He grimaced. What a coincidence. The concept of becoming superhuman by changing the makeup of his body into a more useful material… Black Thread Human: The body is converted into independent black threads that work together to mimic a human shell with the added benefits of modular thread control limited by experience.

He could have picked any material really, but he was familiar with stitching together humans, and having an internal supply of thread for corpses would only elevate his necromancy in the future.

"Five minutes." Nihil hesitated, played with the concept.

"Four minutes." Blood mage? No, asinine, playing with your own lifeblood in the early levels was a stupid risk when he had better options available. Spatial magic? Too expensive, for all that he'd managed to create an inventory in the future. He wasn't a physicist by any means. Summoner? Without relying on actively present biomaterials, it was a hard ask for the system.

Especially considering that for all that he could possibly purchase a skill to make earth golems, he had no knowledge discount beyond the multitasking control aspect. He knew nothing about mud or mineral composites or whatever. He sighed, unable to find a superior alternative in the short time frame given. His experience points were just enough to convert his entire body into the strong modular material of black threads, his name for condensed biomass.

A decentralised neural system network to replace his brain, thus eliminating the danger of getting shot in the head. The threads would disengage his growth from human biology, allowing him to grow more powerful through skill use rather than points, which was its own kind of benefit. Immune to many dangers, survivability increased, an affinity to necromancy once he eliminated Hope as a factor…

"Three minutes." He likely could have come up with something better if given enough time, but he knew this bitch was serious. She'd really blow his brains out if he tested her. If she couldn't neutralise him as a threat, she'd end his life. That was just the sort of relationship they had… The kind of relationship he could understand. As for the fact that the black thread conversion could be applied to dead biomass not of his own in the future through adding descriptors to the skill?

Call it hedging, that was just his little play. Could Hope tell when someone didn't break the promise, but merely left a path open? All warfare was based on information. He was at a disadvantage since the bitch had invented a new skill on the fly.

"I shouldn't have saved you," Nihil eventually decided.

"Your hubris has always been legendary, that's why you were Pride. You thought that just because you travelled back, everything suddenly came under your control," Hope answered.

"Two minutes."

"I have a skill, one that will turn me into a more close-range combatant until it grows further," Nihil muttered.

"Tired of hiding behind the bodies of your betters? Good." Was the only reply he got.

"Fuck, you're really going to make me do this." Nihil sighed.

"One minute."

"This might hurt, so step back," Nihil warned her, before confirming the trade of 8001 experience points for losing his humanity in a manner that was more than just metaphorical. Confirm He collapsed to the floor face-first as an all-encompassing pain erupted in his chest, spreading all the way outwards to his limbs and fingertips. Had he been a weaker man he would have screamed as his body twitched and churned, tendons, bones, veins all being pressed together, expanding, restructuring.

Skills were metaphysical, not something dependent on mana, or some reserve of energy. They were just things you were, things you could do. Superpowers, basically. Superpowers purchasable through a highly personalised system fitted to your knowledge base. He writhed in agony on the white floor, eyes gone, replaced by black thread that hadn't quite learned how to mimic eyesight yet. His sense of time disappeared alongside all his senses as he writhed.

All he knew was that all pain had an end, and that he wasn't weak enough to waste extra experience points on making any skill painless to use. Eventually, he opened his eyes, having lost all human feeling in his body and stared at the sky. You have 4 minutes to rest! Please read the guidelines on how to use your experience points to create skills!

"Finally awake?" Hope asked from where she was sitting down next to him, toying with her gun. She hadn't shot it, good, Nihil thought with a mind that didn't feel much different from the one he'd had before. Well, he had specified that the threads should mimic humanity.

"That was painful," Nihil commented.

"Show me the skill," Hope demanded brusquely. Nihil grunted, focusing, feeling the black threads that now made up his existence. Tiny little snakes that could only be manipulated en masse for now. He'd have to learn fine control later. Giving him full control from the beginning would have ballooned the initial cost. No need for that, especially considering that the next level wasn't very complicated.

He raised an arm towards Hope and forced the threads to come alive from his skin, several of them flopping out of his palm and falling limply towards the ground. He'd have to work on that, he determined with a sigh while Hope gave a satisfied nod.

"Good, body transformation skills are very expensive, but raise survivability like no other," she complimented him, before continuing on with the next topic.

"Me and Patel decided it would be best if we all split up," Hope explained, nodding to the silent Indian doctor sitting far away. Nihil turned his head and saw the three doors leading to level 1. In every intermission, the people who'd passed the previous level together and entered the space in-between together could choose to compete in the next one as a team, or to be assigned new compatriots, or competitors.

"It's smarter considering that we need to warn as many people who might not yet know that the administrators manipulate the rules to trick humans into potentially deadly behaviour," Hope explained.

"We also need to warn others that the skills are better created in conjunction with one's pre-existent knowledge base." It was as Patel noticed Nihil was awake that he stood up and walked closer. Hope continued explaining.

"We decided to start a small organisation, name pending. Let's try to save as many people as we can while spreading useful information."

"How quaint," Nihil muttered as he sat up. He stretched his arms, feeling no stiffness and a strength and potential that he couldn't quite describe but which his stats did. He snorted at Hope's reasoning. The obvious reason why she was separating from him was so he couldn't kill her in her sleep and remove the sword of Damocles hung over his head. Saving people. What a bunch of bullshit.

Nihil Experience: 372 Exp Spent: 8001 Level: 8 Str: 14 Agi: 11 Dex: 45 Per: 23 Vit: 90 Reg: 0 Skills: Black Thread Human: The user's biomass is converted into independent black threads that work together to mimic a human shell with the added benefits of modular thread control limited by experience.

"We'll meet again later, I'm sure the paths will converge again at some point," Hope said meaningfully.

"It was unfortunate that the skill you took knocked you out, although the twitching was sort of funny," she said with a sadistic smirk.

"It was not," Patel reassured Nihil.

"I am glad you are alright."

"Thank you, doctor," Nihil grunted as he stood up and dusted himself off, looking towards one of the non-descript wooden doors floating in the middle of the space.

"I hope Hope advised you on how to create a consistent and beneficial skillset?" he asked as the timer ticked down to the last minute. Patel nodded, somewhat happily.

"The situation is frightening and highly unusual, but at least I have more supernatural ways of healing people now. Hope even suggested that I scale it with the amount of people I save with it. A fascinating way to increase quality without using points that I hadn't considered."

"Well, I'm sure we would have had a lot more to discuss," Nihil muttered, stepping towards the door on the left.

"But I guess we'll have to save that for some other time."

"See you," Hope said with a cheeky nod. The alarm to enter the doors rang, and Nihil stepped through onto the sandy beach of the level in which he'd once designed the skillset now seemingly out of reach for a while to come." Level 1: Deserted Island," Nihil muttered as he looked at the picturesque sea stretching endlessly into the horizon.

"I did need a vacation," he determined eventually and sat down first thing first. Before he moved, he had to understand his new body. Everything else could take a backseat for now.